I thought I had to be perfect

I’ve been reading an excellent book by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner; it’s called How Good Do We Have to Be? I’ve been getting a lot out of it and recommend Kushner highly if you are looking for some uplifting reading.

Kushner does a great job of taking a smorgasbord of material and subject matter and drawing a neat conclusion from it; and I seem to get more knowledge comfortably from that kind of teaching than just someone pointing out Point A and Point B, I want to know what happens at Point A.1 and Point A.9, know what I mean?

In How Good Do We Have to Be? the author uses the Garden of Eden as a jumping point and builds each chapter from what is happening during Adam and Eves’ lives in the Garden, the choice to eat the much-debated fruit and their subsequent exit from the garden and their journey thereafter.

I Thought I Had to Be Perfect

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The first thing that happens to Adam and Eve when they enter the world of knowing good and evil is that they feel shame at the experience of having their misbehavior exposed. Their nakedness is a symbol, a physical manifestation of their being seen when they would rather not be seen. Freud theorized that the nearly universal dream of finding ourselves in public only partially dressed is a symbolic expression of our fear that if people examined us closely, they would judge us inadequate.
Rather than guilt “We have done something we should not have done”, they feel shame; “We are being judged as bad people”. Just as adolescents are exquisitely self-conscious that everyone is looking at them and judging their looks, their clothes and their hair.

Adam and Eve, so new to the world of being grown-up humans, have the sense of being exposed and evaluated. In the biblical image, they realize that they are naked and seek to cover themselves. Before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, the Bible makes a point of telling us, they were as naked as the rest of the animals and like the animals they felt no shame, but once they rose above the animal level and came to understand that some things are right and others wrong, they gained a sense of self-consciousness, a sense of being held to a standard in a way that no other animal is.

It is not that being naked was immoral, rather that a person with a sense of morality knows the feeling of being scrutinized and judged.

When Charles Darwin shocked the nineteenth century world his theory that human beings and apes had a common ancestry, someone asked him whether there was still anything unique about the human being. Darwin answered, “Man is the only animal that blushes.” That is, human beings are the only creatures capable of recognizing between what they are and what they can be expected to be, and of being embarrassed by that gap.

We tend to use the words guilt and shame more or less interchangeably, as synonyms for feeling bad about ourselves. But psychologists and anthropologists see them as different emotions. Basically, they see guilt as feeling bad for what you have done or not done, while shame is feeling bad for who you are, measured against some standard of perfection or acceptability.

The distinction is crucial, because we can atone for the things we have done more easily than we can change who we are. But human nature being what it is, we move so easily from one to the other. We hear criticism of something we have done, and translate it into a comment about what sort of person we are. We assume it is our worth as a person, not just our behavior that is being judged and found wanting.

When religion teaches us that one mistake is enough to define us as sinners and put us at risk of losing God’s love, as happened to Adam and Eve in the traditional understanding of the story, when religion teaches us that even angry and lustful thoughts are sinful, then we all come to think of ourselves as sinners, because by that definition every one of us does something wrong, probably daily.

If nothing short of perfection will permit us to stand before God, than none of us will.

Under that definition of sin, our lives will be dominated by feelings of guilt and fear, guilt for the mistakes we have made, and fear of making yet another one. And guilt and fear don’t bring out the best in anyone. They drain the joy out of life and make us unpleasant companions.

But when religion teaches us that God loves the wounded soul, the chastised soul that has learned something of its own fallibility and its own limitations, when religion teaches us that being human is such a complicated challenge that all of us will make mistakes in the process of learning how to do it right, then we can come to see our mistakes not as emblems of our unworthiness but as experiences we can learn from; we will be brave enough to try something new without being afraid of getting it wrong. Our sense of shame will be the result of our humility, our learning our limits, rather than our wanting to hide from scrutiny because we have done badly.